“It wasn’t a surprise to us that she lost,” said Salvatore Martello, a hotel owner and fisherman who won the election running independently from Italy’s main parties. “In the years she was mayor, she curated an image abroad of the island and the migrant situation, forgetting its people.”

The article highlights the issues that Lampedusans face, including limited access to medical and maternity care, water quality, and job shortages. Though some residents quoted in the article supported helping migrants, they noted that many on the island grew frustrated with the lack of resources spent on their own needs.

Think of Lampedusa(October 2017)by Josué Guébo, a forthcoming title in the African Poetry Book Series,reflects on Lampedusa from the refugees’ point of view. A collection of serial poems, the book addresses the 2013 shipwreck that killed 366 Africans attempting to migrate secretly to Lampedusa.

In the introduction, John Keene writes, “A spate of migrant shipwrecks in 2014 and subsequent years, as well as the unfolding refugee crises that have commanded the attention of the news media over the last two years, point to the salience of Think of Lampedusa’s concern with a topic the West still struggles to understand, let alone adequately address.”

The crossing from North Africa to this island and other Mediterranean way stations has become the most dangerous migrant route in the world. Guébo considers the Mediterranean not only as a literal space but also as a space of expectation, anxiety, hope, and anguish for migrants. Guébo meditates on the long history of narratives and bodies trafficked across the Mediterranean Sea. What did it—and what does it—connect and separate? Whose sea is it?